Sweden is judging citizenship files filed at five years against an eight-year rule

Most immigration changes arrive one at a time, and you get a year to adjust. Sweden did something different this summer. Between the start of June and the middle of August it changed the salary you need for a work permit, stopped issuing permanent residence permits, raised the citizenship requirement from five years to eight, attached an income floor and a civics exam to it, gave itself new grounds to revoke a permit, and then, on 14 August, passed a law making family reunification considerably harder from October. Eleven weeks, and almost every rung on the ladder from arrival to a Swedish passport moved. If your plan was to study or work in Sweden and settle there afterwards, the plan you made is not the plan that now exists.

The detail that should stop you: there was no transition period

Start with the part that does the most damage, because it is the part almost nobody outside Sweden has registered. The new citizenship rules came into force on 6 June 2026, and they arrived without transitional arrangements. That phrase sounds like a technicality. What it means in practice is that the Swedish Migration Agency now assesses every citizenship application it decides after that date against the new rules, including applications that were filed months earlier, under the old rules, and were simply still sitting in a queue. People who counted five years of legal residence, checked they qualified, paid the fee and submitted are being measured against an eight-year requirement they could not have known about when they applied.

There is no appeal to fairness available here, because nothing went wrong procedurally. Sweden was entitled to legislate this way and chose to. But it tells you something useful about how to plan around Swedish immigration policy right now, which is that a submitted application is not a locked-in position. Anywhere else, the honest advice is usually to file early and let processing time work in your favour. In Sweden in 2026, filing early bought a lot of people nothing at all, and the reasonable assumption for the next few years is that a rule can move underneath a pending file rather than waiting politely for the queue to clear.

Permanent residence does not exist any more, so citizenship had to be redrawn

On 12 July 2026 Sweden abolished permanent residence permits as a general rule. The categories that used to receive them, people granted protection, those staying on exceptionally distressing grounds, people facing lasting barriers to removal, and relatives of those groups, no longer do. Even long-term resident status, the EU-derived status that is meant to be the durable one, now comes with a five-year permit rather than an open-ended one. The government framed it as aligning Swedish practice with the minimum guarantees EU law requires, which is an accurate description of the legal mechanism and a slightly generous description of the intent.

That created an obvious problem, because Swedish citizenship had always been built on top of a permanent permit. If the permit is gone, the step it supported has nothing to stand on. The Migration Agency's answer, confirmed in the past week, is that five categories of temporary permit holder can now apply for citizenship without ever holding a permanent permit: people with long-term resident status in Sweden, recognised refugees and people with subsidiary protection, those granted a permit on exceptionally distressing grounds, people who cannot be removed because of lasting impediments, and their qualifying relatives. To use it you generally need well-founded prospects of being granted a long-term residence permit, and you must hold a valid permit on the day you apply. Anyone who has already lived in Sweden for at least ten years and meets everything else is released from the prospects test entirely.

Read that clarification for what it is. It is not a loosening. It is Sweden patching a route it had just cut the foundations out from under, and the patch still runs through the eight-year clock, the income test and the exam.

The income test most people fail without realising

The self-support requirement attached to citizenship on 6 June asks for income of at least three income base amounts a year, which lands around 20,000 SEK a month before tax. That figure is not high by Swedish standards, and that is exactly why it gets underestimated. The trap is in what does not count. Income from a partner does not count, so a household that comfortably clears the number on two salaries can still have one applicant who fails on their own. Income from assets does not count either, which catches people who arrived with savings and structured their life around them. And income from temporary or short-term work does not count, which is the single most common shape of employment for someone in their first years in a new country, moving between fixed-term contracts while they build a record.

There are carve-outs for pensioners, for people with disabilities, and for full-time university students, and that last one matters for Visagrad readers specifically. A student who is genuinely enrolled full-time is not expected to clear the income bar while studying. What the exemption does not do is pause the clock or reduce the eight years. It means your student period is not disqualifying, and it means the requirement lands the moment you stop being a student, which is precisely the stretch of your life when your income is most likely to be coming from short contracts that the rule does not recognise.

The civics test sat its first paper this month

Since 6 June, applicants aged 16 to 66 have had to show knowledge of Swedish and of Swedish society, either through qualifications they already hold or by taking a test. Those aged 67 and over are exempt. The society half of that requirement, the medborgarskapsprovet, was sat for the first time in history on 15 August 2026, in Stockholm, run by the Swedish Council for Higher Education. It was a pilot round with a limited number of seats, somewhere near a thousand, and it was free. Everyone who sat it received a result, and the result went to the Migration Agency automatically, so calling it a pilot understates what was at stake for the people in the room.

The format is around 60 multiple-choice questions with four options each, 90 minutes, on paper, in Swedish only. It draws on Sverige i fokus, the study material the Council published with the national education agency, which itself sits on Sweden's official civic orientation content. You cannot simply decide to sit it: registration opens only after the Migration Agency invites you as part of your citizenship application, and it invites you only if you have not already satisfied the knowledge requirement some other way. A fee close to 2,000 SEK is expected from 2027 sittings onward. The Swedish language exam, the other half of the knowledge requirement, has not been introduced yet, so anyone treating the August paper as the whole hurdle is looking at part of it.

This week's vote: family reunification gets harder on 1 October

On 14 August the Riksdag passed the last piece, and it takes effect on 1 October 2026 with some transitional provisions. The maintenance requirement for bringing a family member to Sweden rises by 30 percent over the current level, and the sponsor must also cover actual housing costs on top. For 2026 that works out to roughly 13,400 SEK plus housing for a cohabiting couple, and roughly 24,000 SEK plus housing for two adults with two children. On top of the money, a sponsor holding a temporary permit now faces a two-year wait before family can join at all, which in a country that has just stopped issuing permanent permits describes a very large share of everyone. The law also lets authorities refuse family applications in cases involving violence or serious abuse within the family, and temporarily widens the situations in which certain family applicants can apply from inside Sweden rather than from abroad.

Put the two-year wait next to the abolition of permanent residence and you can see the shape of what Sweden has built. Arrive on a temporary permit, which is now nearly everyone, and your family waits two years and clears a higher bar. Meanwhile the route to something durable runs eight years, through an income test that does not count your partner's salary and an exam sat in Swedish. None of these rules is unusual on its own. Assembled in one summer, they add up to a country that has quietly stopped being a settlement destination and started being a work destination that you visit for a long time.

Also this week: Poland closed a work route for three nationalities

Poland made a change in the last ten days that lands directly on part of Visagrad's readership. From 15 August 2026, nationals of Colombia, Georgia and Venezuela can no longer enter Poland visa-free if the purpose of the trip is work, and must obtain the appropriate visa before travelling. From 22 August, the same nationals generally cannot work in Poland on the basis of a work permit if they entered visa-free and are still staying on that basis. The route that a lot of people were using, arrive without a visa and let the employer arrange the work permit afterwards, is closed for these three passports.

There is a genuine grandfather clause, so this is not as brutal as it first reads. People who entered Poland before 15 August 2026 are not caught by the entry change, and people who had already started employment on a work permit while legally staying visa-free before 22 August 2026 are not caught by the work restriction. Visa-free entry for tourism and other permitted short stays is untouched. If you are Colombian or Venezuelan and were planning to go to Poland and find work once you arrived, that plan needs a visa in front of it now, and the difference between having entered on 14 August and 16 August is the difference between two entirely different sets of rules.

Also worth knowing: ETIAS still has no launch date, and nobody can sell you one

The European Union's travel authorisation system has now lost its own target date. The late-2026 launch that appeared on official EU material has been removed, and the agency building the system has concluded internally that 2026 is not achievable, with a revised timeline expected after a meeting in September and 2027 the realistic outcome. This is worth stating plainly for one reason: no ETIAS applications are being accepted by anybody, at any price. Every site currently offering to register you, pre-apply for you or reserve your ETIAS is selling something that does not exist. When it does launch, the EU has said it will announce a start date several months in advance, so there will be no situation where you need to move quickly on a link someone sent you.

What is real, and already affecting travel, is the Entry/Exit System, which has been operating across the Schengen area since April 2026 and produced substantial airport queues through this summer. If you are flying into Europe as a non-EU national in the coming months, budget time for biometric registration at the border. That one you will actually meet.

What to do if Sweden was your plan

If you have a Swedish citizenship application pending, the useful action this week is to find out in writing which rules your file is being assessed under and how many qualifying years the agency currently credits you, rather than assuming the answer you were given when you applied still holds. If you are on a Swedish temporary permit and settlement was the point, work out now whether you fall inside one of the five categories that can apply for citizenship without a permanent permit, because if you do not, the honest position is that Sweden currently has no defined route from where you are to a passport. If you are planning to bring a partner or children, the 1 October date is the one that matters and applications lodged before it may fall under transitional provisions, which is worth confirming before you wait. And if you are still choosing a country, this is a reasonable moment to compare Sweden against destinations that did not extend their settlement clock by three years without notice this summer. That is not a recommendation against Sweden. It is a recommendation to make the comparison with the 2026 rules rather than the ones written on the last blog you read.

Frequently asked questions

This roundup reflects reporting as of 23 August 2026. Sweden's citizenship, residence and family immigration reforms are being applied for the first time right now and interpretation is still settling, the Polish restriction carries grandfather provisions that turn on exact dates, and the ETIAS timeline is expected to be revised again in September. Confirm the current position for your own case with the relevant authority, or with Visagrad, before acting on any of it.